Defence finds it doesn’t pay to delay

The Department of Defence has kicked off its latest attempt to overhaul its troubled PMKeyS payroll and human resources system, announcing yesterday that it had signed a $16 million deal with UXC subsidiary Red Rock Consulting to provide a “technical refresh" of its personnel systems.

The contract will form part of a wider overhaul of its disparate systems that is slated to cost taxpayers up to $500 million to implement, 10 times its original budget.

Announcing the Red Rock deal ­yesterday, the Minister for Veterans’ Affairs and Defence Personnel,
Alan Griffin
, said the project was a key component of plans to integrate the various pay systems for military, ­reservist and civilian personnel.

Previous efforts to integrate two military payrolls, Australian Defence Force Pay (ADFPAY) and the Central Reserve Pay System (CENRESPAYII) with the civilian payroll system (PMKeyS) have stalled, culminating in a bungle that caused pay for elite troops to be withheld.

“The project will address the current technology risks associated with the PMKeyS and CENRESPAYII ­systems and ensure continuity of the personnel and pay functions," Mr Griffin said in a statement.

Defence says PMKeyS “provides a range of human resource and management functionality that includes personnel and career management, leave administration, record-keeping, payroll for civilian staff and workforce planning and reporting".

The system was originally designed to replace ageing personnel systems but it has only ever been rolled out to cover Defence’s civilian staff. For ­uniformed personnel, the ADFPAY platform, based on ageing COBOL programming, is still used.

Last year Defence admitted it could take years to deliver on the vision of ­integrated payroll and human ­resource system for uniformed and ­civilian staff, a project it began work on over a decade ago.

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Red Rock Consulting chief executive Jonathan Rubinsztein said reserve payment system CENRESPAY II would be integrated into the PMKeyS systems as part of the upgrade.

“This should provide a platform for Defence to work out what they want to do with the other platforms. This is a technical refresh, so we are taking the existing underlying architecture and upgrading all the technology," Mr Rubinsztein said.

“This is the first upgrade of the new payroll environment that Defence is using, and I am sure they will look at this as part of their wider strategy to bring on board the other payroll applications."

Last September Defence surprised some by announcing its decision to stick with its incumbent supplier, ­Oracle, to provide the core software platform for the long-delayed overhaul of its enterprise systems.

The decision to retain Oracle as the base for the payroll upgrade effectively ended any medium-term prospect of Defence moving to a single integrated software platform for its human ­resources and payroll, financials and logistics systems.

For the past decade Defence has run three separate core enterprise software systems built on products from competing suppliers.

German software company SAP supplies the ROMAN financials ­system, Mincom supplies the SDSS ­logistics system and Oracle supplies the PMKeyS human resources and payroll systems.